“Have you bought an eSIM?” I asked an older friend who was taking a cruise with her husband. “Not yet,” she replied. So I bought them both eSIMs and sent the QR codes to her phone. Let’s call her Heidi. Then I stopped and thought, they’re both at the airport, how will they scan the codes? So, I sent my friend’s eSIMs to her husband’s phone so she could just scan them off his (and vice versa).
When you buy yourself an eSIM, it’s easy to scan, especially if you buy it on your computer. But how do you scan something onto your phone when it’s on your own phone? Instead of a complex solution, I just thought to use another device, the closest one possible. Luckily my friend and her husband are happily married and still cruising together.
There are ways to manually input QR codes, obviously, but that defeats the point of this ultra-easy technology. But look at how handy this upgraded form of barcodes has become in our lives.
I use QR codes so often in my life, that they are hardly noticed. If you want to claim your free weekly Starbucks beverage (if you are an FNB customer and make the requisite number of credit card transactions in a week), the mechanism is a QR code.
Going overseas and need data? Buy an eSIM that uses a QR code. For $12 (R214) I bought three days’ worth of unlimited data for my trip to Amsterdam this week. For $5.50 (R98) you can get a day of unlimited data from KnowRoaming.com. Gone are the days of those extreme bill shocks – when making one Google search cost R5,000, as a friend phoned me about 15 years ago to complain.
Travel has become infinitely easier, especially when you need internet access. Free Wi-Fi is readily available – especially in airports, hotels, conference venues, and even restaurants. Don’t use free Wi-Fi without a VPN, please. Please. You can use this wonderful free VPN from Proton instead.
For years, I haven’t left home without an eSIM, so I have connectivity as soon as I arrive. I always buy from KnowRoaming.com but I check the other options before a trip. Vodacom offers 1GB for R99 for seven days.
For most trips, a gig of data for a few days or a week is totally doable. But you need to turn off a bunch of data-gobbling services (any streaming service like YouTube, or Spotify) and any cellular backups.
But an uncapped daily offering is a wonderful thing. I’m happy to pay extra for it. I take a lot of pictures when I am in a foreign city (I’m an architecture geek) and send them to my wife and my architect mother Sylvia. (I stopped posting to social media years ago.)
Having an uncapped travel data package means I can send pictures and videos, make voice calls and generally behave as if I am on my own 30GB-a-month Vodacom contract. Not that my daily usage is that data-heavy (I’ve been checking my daily usage just to see) and I do all of these things on 1GB eSIM. But for not much extra, instead of a seven-day package, the daily uncapped option wasn’t much more expensive.
For years, getting online while travelling overseas has been horrendously expensive. Now we have to work on making the Rand a stronger currency, please.
